THE POETRY OF FRANCIS WEBB

Description

This book explores the poetry of Francis Webb who was both one of the greatest poets of last century and a man who in the second half of his life went in and out of mental hospitals, where he also died. The first half of the book re-proposes the contents of the first edition, which analyzes in detail the poetic language, its metaphors, symbols and their meaning, but also poetic devices – highlighting the progressive development of a central theme, aiming towards creating the myth of Christ in the figure of the poet-patient. The second half is dedicated to celebrate Webb’s ability in the use of words and their meaning, comparing his poetry with most contemporary poets, where we show how its vocabulary richness is much higher than W.B.Yeats’ and close to the one of Sylvia Plath. In the last chapter on computational analysis of poetic form and content, his poetry is comparable to the one of Elizabeth Bishop and further away from E.E.Cummings’. In the final section of the book, focussing on the Harmony of Sound and Sense, we show how the majority of his poems communicates a negative mood, while a good third tries to reconcile negative with positive mood, by balancing negative contents